Note that if using STSDEV with IIS7, you'll need to customise the Microsoft.SharePoint.Targets file for configurations that reset the app pool - see the STSDEV project in the code ZIP for a version of this. Also, the default configurations output by STSDEV do not support debugging, so to enable this (for each configuration you want to debug in) you need to:

Move the .csproj and .csproj.user files, along with the Properties folder, into C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\<x>, where <x> is the name or number of the web application corresponding to the SharePoint site you'd like to debug on.

Imtech STSADM extensions - effectively does the same thing as the SharePoint Solution Generator (part of the SDK), but without the GUI.

Also see Step 5 in Ari's post on creating custom list definitions. Once you've extracted the schema (using Imtech or the Solution Generator), you'll want to follow this step to hook up the Content Type used by the list to the site-level Content Type rather than the copy of the Content Type that the list gets.

In time, I will also post a script for extracting a list def with content types and site columns correctly hooked up in one go - it's not quite "community ready".

In terms of the User Control demo shown in this section, the code ZIP includes both the OFC303.UserControlWebPart and DebugApp projects, though without the SQL albums database (that was used to generate the ListView) this code won't deploy. However, the AjaxWebPart.cs that I inherited from (to get Ajax working) may be useful to some, as might the relatively simple UserControlWebPart.cs. Also in the code ZIP is an AjaxEnabler project I wrote to automate all the custom Web.config tweaks that get AJAX working. This is similar to "Ajax.Config" as available on the CodePlex Features project, but that wasn't around at the time.

6. Get friendly with Powershell

Zac showed a couple of quick demos of Powershell use in SharePoint. Here's a guide to get you started (from Zac's post). I'll try to post my own views on this in upcoming weeks.

7. Make peace with SharePoint Designer... it's for developers, too!

In terms of the features that were demoed, I showed:

Creating a Linked Data Source combining SQL and SharePoint data

Multiple item grid views and alternative layouts

A joined sub-view that linked the SQL data with SharePoint data based on a "foreign key"

No-code conditional formatting

No-code two-way data binding with a single item form

Web part connections between the grid view and form

A completely custom XSLT rendering that generated a Silverlight chart from a data source

The code ZIP excludes the "code" for this demo (other than the Visifire XSLT), as without the database and specific SharePoint data this is relatively useless. However, here's a few links that may be helpful:

Dustin Miller's TechEd presentation from 2007 (available to watch online) demos many of the same Data View Web Part features that were shown. Dustin is the king of the Data View!